Professional Development
(Originally published in Vignettes, 2014)

            I missed the first day of in-service class. Well, I played hooky. Our supervisor assigned us one of those made-to-order Act 48 classes that we could have finished at home on-line had we had a snow day in August. I was too tired to attend after spending a night bar hopping with a friend who is a weightlifter. I spent most of my afternoon emailing my most ambitious parents about their Princeton bound students, introducing myself, placating their expectations using my best trailer park diction.

            The next day, when the instructor, Mrs. Pythia Paramedir, concluded her lecture on how to accelerate the reading competency of 11th graders from the fourth-grade level to Princeton level in one marking period, she gave us a quiz. She said that the quiz should take us five minutes to complete (essay form).

            I was clueless. I kept looking around trying to find something to refer to, something to read, or someone’s paper to copy. If I let myself drift, I know I would use my laptop to look at sports scores, bag the quiz, and give her an excellent evaluation. That would get me off the hook. The quiz: describe the differences in educational themes in Klondike and Berry, two journal articles we were supposed to have read but were almost unreadable because the copy machine she used was running out of ink.

            My colleagues got busy writing so that they did not have to stick around and do overtime or kiss some central office administrator’s ass if they happened to show to see if we were as bored and miserable as our students would be in September. I sat there looking stupid, which is not a hard thing to do for me. Learning to be stupid has more benefits in education than learning to be smart. Stupidity can earn you merit pay; intelligence only earns letters in your personnel file.

            Out the window, I saw a large group of teachers playing softball. Most of them were standing around in left field. They reminded me of gourds in a field because of their body shapes. They had chosen the other professional development class --- team building. District guidance counselors were in charge. I began to scribble something down on my paper using the educational jargon of the time making sure to throw in statistical varia-tion analysis words like mean rather than common man terms like average. I asked Gail to see her paper to get an idea if I was on the right track.

            Gail knew little about literature or how to critique it. She was a nice enough young woman who would much rather have been home having babies or shopping with her mother-in-law. I was surprised when she was willing to hand her paper over to me, but she did it willingly without any eye contact.

            Women who avoid eye contact seem demure at first almost pitiful. If you get to know them, which for most men takes decades, you realize that they have a sixth sense that only their eyes can expose. It might be their natural inclination toward exhibitionism that they decline their eyes preferring like exotic dancers to expose their bodies rather than reveal their souls. They have an uncanny way of recognizing weaknesses in others. This is due to their primeval mothering instinct. This power makes them reprehensible and the most threatening of the human species. They have panther eyes and like panthers, when the time is right, they take advantage of that weakness. They thrive on disequilibrium making sure they are in the audience for the next feeding frenzy when the weakest pup needs to be culled from the litter. The Human Resources Department needs their service to keep fresh blood in the human pipeline and the jungle inhabitants fit, vigorous, and off balance. When put in charge, they are most indelicate when weaning the weakest of their brood withdrawing their milk slowly until the weakest starved and dizzy for her support falls from the nest voluntarily.

            Men on the other hand (I mean “normal” men, who have not yet morphed into unisexual androids.), once they know a weak-ness in themselves willingly admit it to colleagues. Give a man the opportunity to talk about his ass and he will map a story from itch to colonoscopy. Men have cultivated this trait from being naked with one another in locker rooms. Men prefer certainty even to the point of degradation as T.E. Lawrence pointed out. Men must know where they stand, must know their place on the totem. Like dogs they sniff each other out then roll on the ground to make sure they have placed themselves in the pecking order correctly. Men prefer calm water with little ripples. This could be why research shows that women (I mean “normal” women, not Hofferesque true believer, man-hating feminists.) prefer working with men.

            Gail used her classroom like I imagine she used her kitchen. Whenever I used Gail’s classroom, she would always hide her stapler, so I brought my own only to find out that she hid her staples too. She felt I was like a bossy mother-in-law rear-ranging her cupboards.

            Gail was a big anti-plagiarist, an all-American girl who bought her clothes at Nordstrom’s. It was her call in life to destroy any vestige of mimesis. People who go over the top in fighting plagiarism really lack knowledge of history. They fear allusion or reference having never read Hirsch on cultural knowledge. They lack depth. I blame higher education for this. They do not teach teachers content these days just how to teach which is impossible to do. Thanks to technology, teachers nowadays do not have to teach at all. We now believe that knowledge emerges miraculously from the cyber world, as medievalists believed life emerged from the mud and ooze after a rain. Technology is a tool like a pencil. Do we ask a pencil to stand up by itself and write Macbeth?

            Gail’s one paragraph was right on point. Not having any idea of the details behind her concise writing, I could not use any of her ideas. She wrote in a way that made her writing impossible to plagiarize unless you copied it verbatim. She learned this writing style early like in elementary school to catch copycats or she read too much Hemingway. There was no bullshit in her answer, no name-dropping, and that rendered it unreadable, uninteresting, and 100% correct. There was nothing else to add to her answer. She was one who followed directions. I doubt if she had any friends when she was in school. She would have been a student who kept her mouth shut and just listened or pretended to listen just like a good student should. That would have been good enough to get an A in my book.

            It was 5:30. The teachers had paid their dues to the parents, school board, and that guy who publishes teacher salaries. It was so late that there were not any parents in the parking lot to time our departure. On the mark, the teachers began handing in their quizzes. I asked the instructor, Mrs. Paramedir, if I could have a syllabus and retake the quiz once I had read the material. I would finally learn what the formula was for grading papers on a curve. I was hoping to get something I could use in my classroom or decrease the time I spent correcting compositions.

            Mrs. Paramedir said, "Oh, you weren't here for the first class." (The "oh" sounded like the "oh" of an elementary school teacher when she discovers that one of her students has soiled his pants.) She had made her point and had once again earned her reputation of pinning pairs of balls on her trophy wall. There was nothing I could say. I had to accept the certainty of degradation. That was fine provided I got what I wanted. If that was what they were paying me for, so be it.

            I followed her up the ramp into the freshly painted annex. The maintenance crew had painted everything white. I was amazed at how slowly she walked. Ghostly. I felt like she was exhibiting me as her trophy to the crowd of teachers below trying to exit the building through one door. I thought there might be too much touching going on down there. On the hand, she was exhibiting what was under her stiff flannel skirt to garner the attention of the folks below. All the other doors nearby were locked for security. The glare from the new, tinted blue windows hurt my eyes. It had begun to rain outside that added to the intensity of the refraction of light and the humidity enhanced the smell of perspiration and perfume rising from the crowd at the bottom of the staircase. Someone had powdered themselves with too much lilac.

            Mrs. Paramedir went into a science room and printed me out a coded syllabus. There were horizontal lines of lettering and digits and vertical lines as well with lettering that looked Hindi or Malayalam. I did not want to appear any more stupid than I was. I still had a slight headache from drinking the night before with my weightlifter friend. I did not tell her I could not understand the code.

            "Oh,” she said, “This is written in Singapore Math. It is new. We expect everybody to understand the code." She turned to go, and I grabbed her arm.

            “Now, just hold on a minute,” I said. I was having an allergic reaction to lilac perfume. I could feel my neck turning red and itchy. I needed a cigarette. There was a frog in a jar of formaldehyde on the science table. I wanted to take the frog and place it on my forehead to cool off my headache.

            "Now you are in big trouble," she said. "And it will be up to me to file charges against you for sexual harassment."

            "I’m sorry for grabbing your arm," I said, "but I just wanted to know if I could retake the quiz."

            "Are you threatening me?" she asked. “I don’t like your tone.” I could not tell whether she was playing with me or being serious. She reminded me of Camille Paglia.

            "No," I said. I wished that I had brought along a witness.

            “Listen,” she said. “If you want to grab something on a woman, you’d better grab something more important than her arm.” I knew I was safe.

            “You mean grabbing is like stealing. You better steal enough to make it worth your while,” I said.

            “Exactly,” she said. “Grab a little and we think you’re afraid; grab a lot and we have something to look forward to.” She hesitated. “You know, I am not used to handing out free advice. I bet you have lost many friends by not paying enough attention to women. Didn’t you have a mother?” She moved uncomfortably closer to me.

            “You’ve been a great help, and I am sorry I underestimated you,” I said. She backed up.

            “I am Pythia, the Priestess of Delphi,” she said. “Here in America, I am known as the Measurer for I am well known for my skill of measuring men. I will let you know by next class if I intend to file charges." It was then that I realized that she was a shot and beer and a Nike just do it girl. She found me attractive, but it was late and was hungry.

            “You mean there’s more?” I asked.

            “Yes. Next in-service day,” she said. I knew I could not wait that long, and I suspected that she was waiting for something more.

             I was not too worried about the sexual harassment charges, but I wondered if this chick had been sniffing formaldehyde fumes. Those kinds of charges had become so common in the educational workplace that they had become a right-of-passage. It had become as common as accusations of racism; neither accusation had anything to do with sex or race, but it seemed that they were the most important issues in school.

            I left Mrs. Paramedir in the room after dispensing a dosage of smiles and relishing my emasculation. I thought she was sad to see me go. By now, it was raining hard. Black clouds were accumulating from the west. I went down the same way I came making sure I would find the unchained door. I got in my car, drove over to the softball field, and looked for some teachers who might know something. The group of teachers that had been in left field was huddling together in the dugout. I went over to them. I asked one man if he understood the syllabus.

            He said, “No. why do you think I chose team building instead of that course? I understand how to play softball but Singapore Math...I’m not one to hop on the bandwagon."

            "Aren't you a math teacher?" I asked.

            "Sure, I am," he said. “And aren't you an English teacher? You are the one who should know about languages; math teachers only need to know how to teach kids to keep score. That's why we are playing softball." Everybody laughed except the guidance counselors who were too busy trying to be less humanistic.
"Who won the game?" I asked.

            "Nothin'. Nothin'," he said. "Chapter One, Introduction to Zero.”

            I got up to walk to my car and noticed Mrs. Paramedir walking across the parking lot pushing a bright yellow plastic wheelbarrow to her car. She looked ridiculous. It was raining everywhere except where she walked. Over top of her were two squawking red-tailed hawks. I thought they would fall from the sky like some kind of mythic omen. I ran across the field shouting, “Pythia! Pythia!” and whistling my best red-tail hawk call.

            She stopped just before she got to her car. I ran up to her and grabbed her ass between the two parked cars. The red-tails flew away.

            “I will tell you exactly what is going to happen,” she said to me. Her eyes drifted from side to side as if she were under some kind of spell. She was ovulating, and my touch increased the flow of lava.

            “Do you know where the Granite Run Mall is?”

            “If it’s in Delaware County, I’m not allowed there anymore,” I said.

            “My husband is on a business trip and won’t be home until late,” she said.

            I had mastered the new Singapore Math and wondered if the new math had any effect on telling time because I sure did not want to be there when her husband got home.

            “Don’t worry,” she said. “Just follow me to Sun Valley.”

“Boy, that’s a reversal,” I said.

            I followed her home doing everything I could not to get lost. There was much traffic that time of day. When we arrived at her house, she asked me to help her plant a balled and burlapped hemlock. She said her husband could not do it because of his heart. She even confided that she and her husband were not very active and then asked me if I wanted a drink. Before I could answer, she was pouring Canadian Club into a tall Yogi Bear glass.
           
            By now, the rain had subsided to a drizzle. She helped me take off my shirt and brought me a pair of her husband’s galoshes. Size twelve. I thought I hope I do not disappoint her. I pretended to fit in the galoshes. I wear a size eight and a half.

            I knew how far I would have to dig to plant her tree. Deep. Very deep. I planted the tree while she watched from the breezeway. Afterward, she asked how she could return the favor. She had changed into her pajamas.

            “How about if you just pretend, I’m at the next in-service,” I said.
I finished my drink and felt much better. I had not noticed before, but Mrs. Paramedir looked a little bit like Candice Bergen. I told her that and she said that people said that all the time. I kissed her several times and left. I was not man enough to wear her husband’s galoshes.

            I went to the Flat Iron bar, drank some more, got sick, and pissed on a wall at Sharples Works before driving home.